At the End of the Road

by Grant Jerkins

  Melodie watched him working on it, and every once in a while she would reach out and run her fingers over his hair. Kyle knew she wished she could talk to him, and that was her way of telling him thank you.

  After a while, his arm got tired. It was numb, and his sawing motion got real slow. Melodie put her hand on his shoulder and held her other hand out for the saw. Kyle gave it to her. They both looked at the chain to see how much progress Kyle had made, but it wasn’t much. The surface was scratched up some was all. Kyle wondered why Mr. Ahearn hadn’t called up to him yet. He’d been at it at least twenty minutes. Usually, if Kyle was up here more than a minute or two he started hollering up at him. Saying things like “Leave that dirty whore alone, boy.”

  Melodie set to it. Her fingers were better now, with new fingernails budding from the beds. In fact, she was doing a better job with the saw blade than Kyle had. She pulled and pushed the saw in long, even strokes. It didn’t slide and skip around like it had when Kyle had been sawing. Slow and even. Kyle could tell that the blade had bit into the metal now. Probably just broke through the heavily oxidized chrome finish, but it was progress. She stopped one time to readjust the garbage bag she was wearing to cover her nakedness. Kyle looked away.

  All he could think about was why hadn’t the paralyzed man called up after him yet. Maybe he was sneaking up here to catch them. Kyle decided to leave Melodie to it. He didn’t want them to get caught, so he went on back downstairs.

  KYLE GOT TO THE BOTTOM AND IT WAS

  dead quiet down there. He looked into the living room and didn’t see anything. He looked to the little arch leading into the kitchen and couldn’t sense any kind of movement there. In the back of his mind Kyle was thinking maybe he had had another stroke. Or that maybe he couldn’t get to his medicine needles in time and the diabetes had killed him. Kyle walked into the kitchen, hoping like hell that he would find him in there, sprawled out in his chair, cold and dead. But that’s not what he found. Not at all.

  Grace was tied up to the door. She was sitting down, and a length of rope pinned her hands up over her head to the doorknob. There were two pieces of duct tape over her mouth, crisscrossed like an X. She wasn’t crying, but Kyle could see where the tears had dried. Her Wonder Woman doll was lying on the floor next to her.

  He untied her hands and pulled the tape off her mouth as gentle as he could. “Are you okay?” he asked her, but she didn’t answer him.

  There was a little blue, thumb-shaped bruise just under her jaw.

  “What did he do to you?”

  She still didn’t say anything.

  Kyle picked up her doll and put it in her hand. He walked her out onto the porch and down the ramp. They crossed over Eden Road and into the corn. Kyle took his sister to the green pond and they sat out there throwing rocks into the stagnant water the rest of the day. He tried talking to her, but she never would answer him. She would look at her doll sometimes and stroke its hair.

  When they went home that evening, neither Mama nor Daddy neither one noticed that something was wrong with Grace. They were far away, not living in their own bodies. Daddy kept his face hidden behind the newspaper, and Mama kept her face poked over the pots simmering on the stove. In the steam and the bright kitchen light, Kyle could see that something was wrong with Mama’s eye. Something was off.

  At dinner, they just stared down into their plates. Neither one of his parents talked to Grace or him except to give short little mechanical directions. Wash your hands. Sit down. Wipe your mouth. And with Jason and Wade at vacation Bible school, the house was quieter than Kyle had ever heard it.

  Kyle didn’t know it yet, but his mother and father’s worlds had changed that day too. Like Kyle and Grace, they would never be the same. Nobody on Eden Road was ever going to be the same. They had all been cast out.

  KYLE WOULD NE VER COME TO KNOW WHAT

  the paralyzed man had done to Grace that day. Ultimately, he came to thank God for sparing him that knowledge.

  During the course of the next week, Grace didn’t say a single word, and when she did begin to talk again, she wouldn’t mention what had happened to her. But the arc of her life had been altered. She was never the same girl. She and Kyle never played much together after that. She kept to herself mostly. Mama took her to doctors, and they gave her pills to help ease her mind.

  She began sneaking cigarettes by the time she was nine. She was caught smoking pot at school when she was twelve. When she started in junior high, Grace got boy crazy. She would sneak off in the middle of the night to be with them. Older boys. Men sometimes. She was expelled from high school for drinking. The police brought her home one night after the boy she was with was arrested for selling heroin. Finally, when she was seventeen, Grace ran away with a thirty-two-year-old man named Lucius Allen. Her mother, (who, frankly, had given up on Grace by then) reported her missing to the authorities, and the police treated it as an abduction. Lucius Allen had a criminal record that included two arrests for pimping. They never found Lucius Allen, and Grace never again contacted her family.

  What became of her during the intervening years, no one will ever know, but ultimately, at the age of thirty-seven, Grace Edwards slid silently away from this world in a downtown Atlanta hotel room, a mixture of methamphetamine, Xanax, and vodka carrying her pragmatic, unafraid little girl’s soul back to Eden.

  THE SERVANT OF THE ASH

  HER SERGEANT CALLED HER AT HOME

  just as she was getting dressed for her shift. He knew that Dana had taken the case to heart and figured that she would want to be there when they pulled the vehicle out. She put on her uniform and headed for the reservoir. A hobby fisherman had spotted an oil slick not too far off from the shore. He was a retired butcher and he fished for carp three days a week—each time from his favorite spot: a giant slab of granite that jutted up and out over the water. He knew the reservoir, and in particular, he knew that spot on the reservoir like he knew tenderloin from short loin. The oil was bubbling up from the bottom, he had said. And there was a shadow down there that had never been there before. It was a car, he had said. See if I ain’t right, he’d said. Just see.

  They saw. He’d been right. With Sweetwater Reservoir being Melodie Godwin’s final destination, the consensus was that they would be dragging out a powder blue 1972 Chevrolet Chevelle Super Sport with Ms. Godwin’s remains lodged inside. How Melodie Godwin had managed to drive her car off a rock cliff and into the reservoir in broad daylight without anyone witnessing it was a question for another day.

  Dana saw the cluster of sheriff’s department vehicles just beyond the bait shop and parked her cruiser amongst them. To the left of the rock slab, the contracted diver was just coming out of the water after having attached the towing wench to the submerged car. No one was fishing today; a crowd of about forty people stretched in a half circle from the shoreline.

  Dana’s heart sank when she saw Mrs. Godwin and Melodie’s oldest sister, Deanna Wilson, at the front of the gathering. Who in their right mind would have called the family? To what purpose? If it wasn’t Melodie’s car, then the family would have gone through this ordeal for nothing. They would have come here feeling that closure was imminent, already allowing themselves to grieve the death of their loved one, to witness this final formality, only to have it snatched away and find themselves shoved back into the lingering discomfort of uncertainty.

  And if it was Melodie’s car, well then Melodie’s mother was about to see firsthand what the body of her daughter would look like after four weeks submerged underwater.

  Dana had never seen such a sight herself, but the old-timers had told her tales. Racially motivated crimes had once been common in Douglas County (still were, really), and in the early 60s as the dams were being completed, this man-made lake (officially the George H. Sparks Reservoir) had been a hot spot to dispose of the bodies of black men killed by whites over rage-filled drunken weekends and sober Sundays of righteousness. After about a week underwater, the corpse
s swelled with gases and floated to the surface, dragging weighted ropes beneath them. Bodies in water decompose at a much faster rate than those underground, but slower than those exposed to air. Things nibble at bodies underwater. Catfish are bad about that. With Melodie (assuming this was indeed her car), if there was an air pocket trapped in the interior with the body, the putrefaction could be quite ugly. Melodie’s mother did not need the last image of her daughter to be any of those eventualities.

  Dana watched the lake water gush and drain out of the car as it emerged. The crime scene photographer snapped pictures as the extraction progressed. Dana couldn’t see the plates yet, but it was a 1972 powder blue Chevelle SS. No question, this was Melodie Godwin’s car. As soon as the vehicle was completely out of the water, Dana scooted behind the photographer and matched the license plate numbers with what she had written in her notebook. They were an exact match.

  SHE WAS DISAPPOINTED.

  Dana was ashamed that the emotion she felt the strongest in this moment was disappointment. She didn’t fully understand why she had taken Melodie’s disappearance to heart like she had. Perhaps it was simply because everybody else was so eager to file it away. Another fast girl living a fast life up and disappeared. So what? But it had meant more than that for Dana, and she felt compelled to keep at it.

  Dana didn’t typically like to look too deeply into herself for the impetus behind her motivations. If someone were to ask her why she had become a sheriff’s deputy officer in the first place, she would not know how to answer. She of course could answer in some generic fashion, but in her heart she did not know what had compelled her to follow this course in life. A desire to help others? Sure. Racial pride? Perhaps. A strong sense of justice in an unjust world? Maybe. Something had formed her to be the way she was, and Dana saw no benefit in digging that something out. So, when the notion to enter law enforcement had entered her mind, Dana had simply put her head down and plowed forward. She did not question it. And when her heart told her to not give up on Melodie Godwin, she just kept pushing forward.

  No, she had not given up, and now here she was, and after this last dose of ugliness, Melodie’s family would finally find some peace, and Dana herself would also find some measure of peace. The steady spiritual itch that had been the unexplained disappearance of Melodie Godwin was now relieved. So why did she feel disappointed? Was it just her ego? Dana was ashamed to acknowledge to herself that it was nothing more profound than wounded pride. She was disappointed in herself for coming at this thing from the wrong angle. She had been certain that Melodie had disappeared on Eden Road. Yes, she had been pleased with herself for finding that safety glass that otherwise would have sunk into the mud with the next good rain. And the boy. Kyle. Dana had centered in on the boy from nothing more than a broken glance through an open door. She was prideful of her instinct to follow up with the boy. And she had grown certain that Kyle had some knowledge about Melodie, but was too scared to tell.

  THE SHERIFF WRESTED THE DRIVER SIDE

  door open while Dana’s friend, Senior Deputy Ben Hughes, opened the passenger door on the other side. The metal joints had set up underwater and groaned in protest at being so rudely made to bend again. Dana couldn’t see because the men’s bodies blocked the view into the car’s interior. They emerged from the car at the same time, and Dana could see straight through it. The front was empty. The backseat too was empty. There was no body. The car was empty, but Dana knew this was not an entirely worrisome occurrence. Assuming she could swim, Melodie very well could have managed to escape from the car, but still drowned. After a crash like that, the driver and any occupants are typically disoriented, unable to tell up from down, unable to swim to the surface. The absence of the passenger side window seemed to confirm that Melodie had at least managed to escape from the car, but it also caused Dana to think again about the auto glass she’d found in the ditch on Eden Road.

  Dana glanced over at Mrs. Godwin. The look of sad puzzlement on the woman’s face was heartbreaking.

  The sheriff returned to the front of the car, leaned in, and pulled the keys from the ignition with his gloved hand. At the rear of the car, he used the key to open the trunk. The sheriff pulled out two black trash bags, tightly knotted at the tops. Ben Hughes reached in and pulled out two more. Ben took out a pocketknife and readied to slit one bag open, but the sheriff waved him off. Both men stepped back and allowed the photographer to take pictures of the unopened bags. The sheriff got out his own pocketknife and indicated with his beefy hand for the senior deputy to proceed as well. Going against most anybody’s interpretation of correct crime scene protocol, they split the bags open. Body parts spilled out from the bags like unfortunate prey from a gutted shark’s belly. The sheriff lurched backward, falling on his backside. He covered his mouth as he coughed and choked. Ben ran to the water’s edge and vomited. Dana heard Melodie’s sister scream, and looked up to see Mrs. Godwin collapse to the ground.

  After a minute, the odor from the bodies carried to Dana. Diluted with air, she knew that she was getting only a fraction of what the two men had been exposed to. The odor made her think of the dead possum she had smelled in the garage on Eden Road, only worse. Dana noted that some of the remains were essentially skeletal, while some held on to flesh in varying stages of putrefaction.

  Dana joined two of her fellow deputies who, like her, had only been observing, and began urging the onlookers away from the crime scene, instructing them to leave the area completely. Dana retrieved a roll of crime scene tape from her vehicle and worked with another deputy to cordon off the area. She busied herself and made herself useful, but her primary interest was in watching the scene unfold and develop. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation would likely take an interest in this, so Dana felt an urgency to see as much as she could while the sheriff’s department was still in control.

  She saw Ben Hughes begin bagging evidence from inside the car, and went over to assist him. As he bagged and tagged the items, Dana ran them to the trunk of the sheriff’s cruiser. The items were of no real interest, trash from the floorboards mostly, but also a pair of bolt cutters and a broken chunk of cinder block.

  Waiting for the next item to be handed out to her, Dana noted that the front seat of the vehicle was adjusted to its uppermost forward position, leaving a space too small for a typical adult to wedge into. Melodie Godwin was a tall girl. In family photographs, she towered over her mother and sisters.

  Ben was holding out the next evidence bag. Dana took it. It was a pair of sneakers. Child size. Boys’.

  THEY WERE AT THE FREE CLINIC IN AT-

  lanta. After the first month/last month deposit on the apartment and the utilities deposits, there just wasn’t enough left over to pay for a regular doctor. At least she had the car. It was hers, free and clear, and in her name.

  Kyle was off. He just wasn’t right. He just wasn’t Kyle anymore. He almost seemed like he was sleepwalking. But that didn’t bother Louise. She figured it was to be expected. Because of the separation. The soon-to-be divorce. The boy was just naturally upset, maybe even a little depressed.

  But whatever was wrong with Grace was not something natural. Grace had not spoken a word, had not even made a sound in the week since Louise had left her husband.

  BOYD HAD TO LEAVE THE HOUSE AT 5:45

  every morning to be at the mail-processing plant on time. As soon as he was gone the morning after he hit her, Louise had woken up Kyle and Grace and told them to get dressed. She packed up her things while the kids were getting ready. After that, she sat them down in front of the TV with bowls of milk and cereal while she went to their room and packed up clothes for them. She loaded up the car, then went back inside to get the kids, thankful that Wade and Jason were away at vacation Bible school. Inside, she found Kyle sitting by himself watching cartoons.

  “Kyle, where’s your sister?”

  Kyle looked around as if just now realizing Grace wasn’t there. “I don’t know, Mama.”

 
Louise checked in the bathroom, and then in all the rooms in the house. “Kyle, she must have gone outside to play, can you go out and find her for me? We’ve got to go. We’ve got a lot to do today.”

  Kyle went outside, and Louise could hear his voice outside calling his sister’s name. Louise took her makeup bag out of her purse and went back to the bathroom mirror to doctor her eye some more. The bruising had deepened overnight, and now the concealer just couldn’t quite cover it. As she worked the makeup into her skin, she stopped thinking for a minute. No thoughts at all. It was a small blessing. Then movement behind her drew her forward again, and she looked at Kyle reflected behind her in the mirror.

  “I can’t find her anywhere. She won’t answer me.”

  Louise threw her paraphernalia back in the bag and zipped it. This was exactly the kind of complication she didn’t need today. Louise stomped outside and began to call for her child. She yelled out promises of spankings and crape myrtle switches, but to no result. Louise stood there in the gravel driveway, ready to cry in frustration, Kyle standing next to her. And then there was a small rustling sound, and Grace emerged from the withering corn. Louise ran up to the girl and shook her roughly by the shoulders.

  “Where have you been? Why didn’t you answer me? You always, always answer your mother. Now get in the car. Both of you.”

  Louise forced herself to calm down once she was on the road with the children. It was going to be hard enough on them, and she wanted to make this transition less traumatic if possible. “We’re going on a trip,” she said to them. “Don’t that sound like fun? Grace, don’t that sound like fun?” But Grace didn’t answer. Louise pressed forward with the speech she had rehearsed. About how much fun this was going to be.